


Everything That Rises

by la_novatrice (fleurs_du_mol)



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: 1900s AU, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, Angst, Child Neglect, F/M, Family Drama, Family Secrets, Flashbacks, Friends to Lovers, Getting Back Together, Hannibal Lecter is Not a Cannibal, Homoeroticism, Infidelity, Internalized Homophobia, Jealous Hannibal Lecter, Jealous Will Graham, M/M, New Orleans, Non-Linear Narrative, Oral Sex, Romantic Friendship, Rough Sex, Sexual Repression, Southern Gothic, Teenage Drama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 02:15:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17572391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleurs_du_mol/pseuds/la_novatrice
Summary: It's the summer of 1916 in New Orleans. Rey Graham and his teenage son, Will, both need work. They find suitable positions in the Lecter household, though Rey's brother Lyall mentions that the newly-arrived Lecters are the subject of dark gossip. All the same, Will befriends Hannibal, the young man of the house, who seems to be as lonely and unwanted as him. The two eventually become lovers, but with jealousies and tensions looming, will they remain so?





	Everything That Rises

_June 1916_  
_New Orleans_  
  
“Dad, those ladies are staring.” Will stared right back at them. He couldn’t help it.

  
    Rey flushed. There was very little he could get past his fifteen-year-old son and he could hardly control the avid and poisonous curiosity that followed in his own wake. “Pay them no mind, Will.” He refused to even glance at the porch of the little shotgun house. He’d seen the two older women from a yard away and he knew they stared at him. His son. No, _her_ son.

  
    These gossips always descended on women whose lovers died or jilted them. In Mr. Reynard Graham’s case, they descended on him—a man whose lover had left—because of the lurid situation’s pure novelty. It wasn’t rare for an upper crust man, new money or old, to keep a lesser woman. What was strange, everyone said, was for lovely, charming, clever Cecile Devereaux to have fallen in her youth for a boy whose only profession was fixing boats and motors and streetcars. How bold to bear a child with him rather than _discard it_ before it could be born.

  
    Nobody would say as much in so many words, but everybody thought it.

  
    Rey, everyone seemed to know even years ago, left formal schooling at the age of thirteen. His parents both died of fever within days of each other, leaving him the head of a brood of four other children. Of the five, only he and his brother Lyall made it to adulthood. Life hadn’t been kind to the Grahams. Death itself seemed to have a voracious appetite for them.  
  
***  
  
    He and Cecile started as acquaintances because he was employed by her family—well, her father—and for some months, they were nothing more. She was _Miss Cecile_ and he was just _Graham._

  
    But for a worldly place, New Orleans felt small. At any rate, it didn’t encourage distance in most senses. The separation of the classes, of different folks, was an illusion that held only unsteadily. Cecile’s father had taken pity upon Rey when he’d spied him on a sidewalk trying to wrangle little Lily and Rosie and Lyall and the older but more insolent Jack, and he’d brought him to work in the massive Devereaux townhouse. They didn’t live there, but Etienne Devereaux made sure Rey was paid enough to secure safe accommodations.

   
    Cecile’s mother never liked him. She ignored him whenever she could and called him _Cajun_ if she had to address him. It seemed to be his accent that gave him the nickname, though Rey had suspicions there was more to it than that. When she realized that the words of a bitter white Creole matriarch whose world order was fading around her didn’t seem to bother Rey, she switched to _American_. He always bit down the response that, in this day and age, weren’t they all? But for Constance Devereaux, it was a pointed insult. He had no blood worth having.

  
    Cecile was much kinder. She observed once that perhaps her mother switched from calling him _Cajun_ to _American_ because there was no evidence that the Devereaux line was completely free of any Cajun ancestors. Only Federalist ones. From then, Rey found himself taken in by her deep green eyes and dark curls. He would complete all his tasks around the house—Etienne was always realistic and fair about what could be accomplished in a working day. He seemed to realize that Constance was best kept away from Rey, so he endeavored to personally supervise the boy as much as he could.        

  
    Once Rey was finished, he would spend time with Cecile. Never in the house. Luckily, as a young lady of means, she had plenty of leisure time. It was nothing for them to take to the quieter streets of the Quarter once Rey taught her how to sneak out. They’d rove a little with his siblings and she’d come back home with nobody being the wiser.

  
    More than once, Rey was sure Etienne suspected something was between them, but he was too mild and fond of Cecile to interfere. The man’s eyes would follow him across a room or look between his daughter’s smiles and Rey’s faint responding blushes, yet he kept his peace.

  
    Eventually, when Rey felt that Jack, the second oldest, could be trusted to keep an eye to the others, he and Cecile would wander in their own company. He learned about her secret desire to travel the world and her mother’s insistence that she remain where she was, and how she enjoyed the jazz that poured out of dancehall doors. He discovered that she was not actually an only child and her older brother had passed from the same fever that plagued Rey’s parents. That surprised him. He didn’t think disease could touch a family like hers. He knew somehow not to say so because it would only hurt her.

  
    Boldly, thinking it might distract her from her dark remembrances that day, he took her into one of the dancehalls. It would be on his head if they got robbed or worse, but he would risk it to see her smile. And she did smile, her eyes going wide at the flurry of sound, light, activity, then her cheeks going pink at the risqué beautiful women with their dashing men. Rey grinned at her and promised her they would be all right—his father had known the proprietor. He’d known the madam upstairs, too, but Rey didn’t tell Cecile that. As far as these places went, things could be much more dodgy.

  
    Cecile nodded, first uncertainly, then with more assurance. Rey sauntered to the opulent, crowded bar and was given two drinks in exchange for his coins. Some kind of beer, he thought, maybe bootlegged or home-brewed. Maybe not. You could never tell those days. Cecile had never had any and wrinkled her nose at the smell but committed to drinking it anyway. They stayed long enough to hear a band play its set, then went back outside into the sticky spring evening. The iron clouds threatened rain and Rey, whose palms always hurt when it was about to splutter or downpour, didn’t matter which, looked for some shelter where they could wait out the deluge. He didn’t want Constance to catch them out because of sopping wet clothes.

  
    A tiny disused house opposite the dancehall did the trick. He grabbed Cecile’s wrist and tugged her toward it gently. First she shook her head and said, “Anyone could be in there.” But the sky released warm, insistent rain upon them and she had little choice but to follow him somewhere or risk their clandestine routines being upended.

  
    “It should pass quickly enough,” Rey assured her.

  
    She nodded. They were both natives, whatever their respective backgrounds. They knew the rain came and went like policemen on their beats. She was the one who’d jiggled the doorknob because the porch was barely big enough for the two of them, and it gave with a stiff creak that promised them nobody had been inside for some time. Rey led her in and held her hand until their eyes got used to the darkness. It wasn’t so bad, he thought. The floor and walls and ceiling were all intact, and whoever left had done it in a hurry. There could be any reason for it, he rationalized. Landlords were cruel. Perhaps someone had been evicted.

  
  
***  
  
    Roughly sixteen years later, Rey wished they’d never found shelter in the rain.

  
    His eyes slid to Will, who was scowling at the owlish ladies on the porch. He shook him a little. “I said to pay them no mind.”

  
    “Is it me, or you? Which of us is the problem?”

  
    Rey considered this. Will took completely after Cecile and had just grown to resemble her more strongly in recent years. With this in mind as a problem for their privacy but no wish to truly leave where he’d been born, Rey raised Will in the bayous and the delta until he had no choice but return to the city and find other work. Cecile, he gathered from the papers, was now married to some financier. She was a society fixture who’d risen like a phoenix from the ashes of youthful indiscretion. The episode merely left her interesting and knowing and a little dangerous. He would be surprised if anyone didn’t have some vague notion of who she was and what she looked like. The Devereaux line was too well-rooted in local history for her to slip unnoticed.

  
    “You,” Rey said. “You favor her too much for people not to know who we are.”

  
    Will’s face crumpled, then he composed himself. “Do you think … do you think I could try to speak to Mother?”

  
    At that, Rey halted them both on the sidewalk and shook Will harder. “We’ve already talked about that.”

  
    Glumly, Will said, “I know. But … you said grandmother and grandfather were both dead, and now it’s just … her.”

  
    Rey’s head went violently back and forth in a jerk of disapproval. “I said _Constance and Etienne_ were dead. They’re not your kin if they’ve disowned you.” He had to crush Will’s weak hopes now, and hard. “Which they did. She could have stayed with me or she could have been a Devereaux. She chose her people.” His eyes searched Will’s. “Money. Power. That’s what she chose. She didn’t choose you. And it isn’t just her. She’s married. She could have other sons, now. I don’t know.”

  
    “Or you,” said Will, his eyes shining with angry tears as he spoke the words with contempt. “She didn’t choose _you_ , either. You never married a Devereaux. She was never a Graham.”

  
    Rey gave a sharp smile. “Don’t have to tell me that, boy.”  
  
***  
  
    What ultimately happened between him and Cecile was like something out of a bad novel, he thought. One time, then a few more, in that dilapidated house and they’d become obsessed with each other. Not long enough after things had started, Cecile, terrified, knew she was pregnant. Rey had tried to be careful, or as careful as he knew how to be. Cautiously, he said they could go to Etienne. He didn’t want Cecile subjected to a hasty abortion on someone’s kitchen table or bar, though it was the first thing she suggested. He was confident her father wouldn’t turn her out. Stupidly, he hadn’t given a thought to the mouths he already had to feed. He thought only of Cecile.

  
    Etienne was willing to be merciful.

  
    Constance was not.

  
    Even when Rey explained he could leave, he would leave, if Cecile could still have her home, Constance had none of it. It was obvious an argument wouldn’t gain Cecile any favor with her mother, who—despite her father’s business acumen and wealth—ruled the house and had only ever barely tolerated Rey in the first place. Haughtily, she informed Cecile that if a baby with this boy mattered so much to her, then he could provide for her. When Etienne inferred too hopefully that this meant Rey could still serve as their handyman, or that Rey and Cecile could get married, Constance just laughed.

  
    They tried living together for the time it took Cecile to carry Will to term. But too much happened in those nine months for there to be any love left between them. Despite his youth and naivety, Jack disapproved almost as much as Constance did of Cecile having a child out of wedlock. It put the three of them at loggerheads. Rey worked as a mechanic, Cecile took in mending, and Jack, miraculously, found a steady job unloading merchants’ goods at the docks. He lied about his age, but he’d always been big and looked older than he was.

  
    Jack went first. He drowned after taking a misstep at night and his body was discovered the next morning tangled in the ropes that had trapped him.

  
    Lily was next. She’d always been fragile after surviving what took their parents, and a flu carried her off.

  
    Rosie was, and Rey wouldn’t have believed it unless he saw it himself, heartbroken. Lily’s twin didn’t linger long. He’d only ever heard of dogs dying of a broken heart when their masters died.

  
    At Rosie’s passing, Cecile was close to her time and told Rey she wasn’t sure if she could raise a child in a house where so much tragedy had happened. Death had emptied their accounts, too, and there was very little they could afford after three funerals. There’d been no wakes. No one cared much about the Graham orphans, even if they sometimes wondered after Cecile’s wellbeing. This turned out to be a blessing because it saved them the expenses of laying out the bodies in an appropriate manner.

  
    When he woke up one morning with Will—then only a few months old—gurgling happily next to him, but no Cecile, Rey wasn’t at all surprised. She’d left a note with Lyall, then only nine, who solemnly passed it to him over their meager breakfasts. Lyall was almost functionally mute. Though he could talk and evidently did just enough to appease teachers when he was at school, he rarely spoke much at home unless it was to Cecile. She could draw things out of him and the two were thick as thieves. Or so Rey had thought. But she’d abandoned Lyall too.

  
    “Did you read it?” Rey asked the slight, auburn haired boy with darker skin than his own.

  
    Lyall nodded. He might not talk a lot, but he read anything he could get his hands on. Books, papers, advertisements, naughty directories that he shouldn’t have. He’d also think nothing of reading something Cecile wrote, even if it was for Rey.

  
    “What did she say?”

  
    “She gone back home.”

  
    Rey nodded, his stomach heavy. He expected that. “And?”

  
    “She said she don’t want Willy.”

  
    “She did leave him here with us.”

  
    Lyall looked for a moment like he might cry. He didn’t. “Everybody goes, Rey. Are you gonna go?”

  
    “No, Ly, I’m not gonna go.” Rey steeled himself, because now that he’d said it, he couldn’t. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Lyall was what he had left. Well, Lyall and Will.

  
    “Good,” Lyall said. He crunched a bit of burnt toast.

  
    “Well—do you like the idea of being an uncle?”

  
    Rey hoped so. He deeply begrudged the squirming, inexplicably hearty little being that Cecile wanted to call William, but he didn’t have the heart to leave him with the Ursulines, and the idea of doing anything worse caused bile to rise in his throat. His ideas of God and Heaven and Hell were still too vivid. Though he’d thought even before this morning of smothering the child … everything his parents and the Monsignor had taught him told him to be ashamed of himself for it. There was enough from those teachings he had discarded already, but somehow, murdering an infant, his own infant, still seemed beyond comprehension.

  
    Besides, he thought, gazing at Lyall, his little brother would be crushed if anything happened to Will. Rey didn’t want that on his conscience.

  
    Lyall nodded enthusiastically as he looked at the makeshift bassinet they’d fashioned out of a broken dresser drawer. “He’s real cute,” he said. “Got her hair. Think he’ll end up with her eyes, too. They’re still blue, but I bet they’ll turn that pond green. And he’s pale. That’s lucky.”

  
    “He is lucky,” Rey agreed. Lyall just didn’t know the extent of why.  
  
***  
  
    Will walked along in sullen quiet, then said, “No, I know you know. But sometimes I think you blame me for how your whole life turned out.”

  
    “In a way, I do.”

  
    Will flinched. Rey always took perverse pleasure in wounding his son. Will was so easy to wound, though he tried desperately to hide it.

  
    “Then why not leave me?” he asked boldly.

  
    “God shackled us together.”

  
    “I’m older than you were when you had to take care of your family.”

  
    “Look where it got me.” Rey shrugged. “Be thankful you aren’t in the position I was in. Besides, I’m all you’ve got.”

  
    “Rather not be thankful or think much on that, thanks.”

  
    “Get all your sass out before we go to see the Lecters—they’d never take me or you on if they knew how your mouth runs.”

  
    “What makes you think Mr. Lecter’s going to be interested in you?”

  
    In the sense that he could offer very few formal assertions of his competence—no diplomas, no evidence of book learning—Rey admitted silently, Will had a point. But Rey was almost alchemical when it came to the mechanical or material, and luckily for both of them, that was the Graham trait Will _had_ inherited. In everything else, looks or otherwise, he was pure Devereaux.

  
    Sharp-witted, quiet, rather imperious—all with the timing of a snake about to strike. He reminded Rey of Constance, a Devereaux by marriage, originally a Pontellier. Even gentle Cecile had demonstrated she was capable of selfishness and impulsive choices. Or perhaps Will had too much of Etienne in him? He was more inclined to read his books and nurse stray animals than he was to make decisions or hunt their food. He was weak. What Rey had once admired as elegant kindness in Etienne manifested as ridiculous soft-heartedness in Will.

  
    There were only small indications that he was flintier than he seemed. The boy was an uncanny fisherman and had gutted fish expertly from the time he was first taught.  
  
***  
  
    But Rey should have known he had a weakling on his hands when his son kept asking after his mother.

  
    Lyall encouraged Rey to tell the truth, so he did.

  
    As brusquely as possible.

  
    Once, when Will was about five, he cried for a full hour when Rey explained yet again that his mama _just didn’t want him and there was nothing they could do about it_.

  
    He remembered it clearly. They were gathered in the narrow front room of the rickety house he’d so proudly rented for his son and Lyall to have their own beds, and Will, all enormous greenish eyes—Lyall had been right, they shifted from a baby’s blue to the color of deep summertime ponds—and pouty mouth, had flung himself on the dusty rug at his father’s words. They’d had a cat, too, to chase off the rats, and she sat mere inches from Will’s snotty nose and copious tears … then surprisingly moved closer to his head and purred. She didn’t run from the loud display.    

  
    Lyall disapproved of how blunt Rey was being, he’d even shouted at him to lay off, but Rey stood firm. What did Lyall know? He was only fourteen. Wasn’t that what she’d said in her letter? Why should he shield Will from the truth? He would have to know sooner or later. His then-teenaged brother’s mouth set in a thin line and Lyall scooped the little man up and told him about the latest explosive experiments in his chemistry class, which allayed the shrill howling.

          
    Over time, Will didn’t cry so much. Didn’t cry at all, actually. But Rey always sensed that the animal emotions were somewhere inside, buried deep and biding their time until they could burst out. This irked him.

  
    Once he was of age, Rey promised himself, he’d leave Will to his own devices. Legally he couldn’t just yet and if he tried, people would talk all the more. It could damage his chances at getting this position. Any position better than one on an old bayou rust bucket. And on the other hand, if he spun Will into an asset that he brought with him … perhaps the both of them stood a better chance together. Times were too tempestuous now for him to risk unemployment. His son was no longer a child, but he was still a fledgling in the ways of the world.

  
    Rey would rather clench his teeth until they were ground into dust and deal with Will’s innate hauteur than ever see himself grandfathering a bastard. He refused to let history repeat himself. This time around, a baby might not be so lucky as Will.

  
    He kept an eagle eye on the boy as he fell into manhood. This meant a number of things, but Rey concerned himself with two above all: looking for work they could feasibly do together, and making sure Will didn’t ever defame himself. He didn’t really need to worry about girls because his son didn’t have any friends to begin with—he was too strange and otherworldly in his manner, like he was looking through and past you at once. They also moved too often for Will to establish any friendships. His only friend was his uncle.

  
    And Rey’s logic about onanism was simple. If Will never quite understood that release could be pleasurable and he only associated it with procreation, then he would save himself a world of trouble. Rey didn't have spiritual issues with matters of the flesh or sensuality any more. He was many questionable things, but he didn’t consider himself a hypocrite—he knew bedding a girl felt good and he wouldn’t deny that, even if asked. His objections were pragmatic. He knew what experience taught him and it was bitter.

  
    Lyall held a difference of opinion. He was more secular than Rey had ever been, and seemed to think Will _should_ know his body, at least in theory and by his own hand. He kept bringing him books. Rey would rather have thrown them in a fire or over the side of a boat. He did, sometimes. But Will was wily and so was Lyall. Rey often forgot that Lyall was barely nine years older than his son. At twenty-four, and what with being both educated and childless, he could better empathize with what it was like to be fifteen.

  
    Especially because Lyall’s own fifteen had looked far different from Rey’s fifteen. It looked more like Will’s. Potentially more expansive. Headier.

  
    Disposing of one dirty book just meant two more would show up weeks later in false covers whose titles were about plants or mathematics. Because Rey couldn’t read very well and didn’t gravitate toward reading for fun, it always took him an age to discover the books weren’t about anything so mundane. So he gave up on that front.

  
    Everywhere Rey and Will had ever lived either had one room or thin walls. He’d only heard the boy pleasure himself _once_ and he’d dragged him out of bed by the scruff of his neck, assuring him there was no end to _that_ but getting a woman with child. Will, ever quick to have a rejoinder, retorted that he hadn’t been in bed with a woman and so there could be no child. Rey felt it was punishment enough not to let him finish. Though he hadn’t looked closely at any part of him, it was easy to tell from red cheeks and shaking hands that Will was on the edge of completion when he’d been interrupted.

  
    It was around that time that Rey started to look in earnest for new work. His answer to halfhearted prayers came in the form of an advertisement that wouldn’t have been out of place forty years ago. One Robertus Lecter, hailing from somewhere in Europe, Rey didn’t care where, placed a short ad in the _Picayune_ for a handyman and a male house servant. It was almost old-fashioned, but then, this Robertus was evidently Old World. Rey hadn’t been in town enough lately to glean much about the Lecters, but Lyall—working as a city librarian, now, and helping Rey and Will as best as he could—explained they’d newly arrived and it appeared that their house in the Quarter was some kind of place for respite, a holiday home.

  
    Lyall warned him that gossip said someone in the family was feeble or mad. It didn’t matter to Rey if anyone was or not. Besides, Lyall related, Mr. Lecter and his nephew were both pleasant—Mr. Lecter’s wife had been out to market the day he called. He told Rey confidently that didn’t believe the rumors.  
  
***  
  
    “I’ve got good testimonials and that’s more than I can say for you.”

  
    Will grumbled but accepted this. “Who actually lives in the house again? What … am I supposed to be saying I want to be hired to do?”

  
    “It’s Mr. Lecter, his wife, and their nephew, Lyall said. He’s met them. It was how we arranged this meeting.”

  
    “Uncle Ly always comes off better than you or me.”

  
    Rey didn’t smile, but his frown did lessen. In public, Lyall was calm, collected, and genteel almost to the point of docility. If folks recognized his surname, they still gave him the benefit of the doubt. He was everything Rey couldn’t be, although it was true that Rey looked more the part than Lyall did with his unruly dark red hair and light umber skin.

  
    “Why do you think I sent him?”

  
    “Well,” said Will. He pushed back at his curls impatiently. They were sticking to his pale, impossibly smooth forehead. At his age, Rey had been covered in spots. “What do they need _me_ for?”

  
    Rey sighed. “They want a servant. I think for the nephew.”

  
    “A servant?” Will squawked. His voice had changed, but under duress, he still squeaked or squawked more than boomed. “Oh, so you’re to play groundskeeper or whatever they want … you get to go outside … and I’m going to be waiting on rich folk hand and foot?”

  
    “I don’t like the idea of any Graham being a servant, but Lyall made it sound like you’d be more like a valet,” Rey said. _Valet_ still fell a little too close to what his maternal grandparents had been. What he had been to Etienne.

  
    “A … what?” It was a rhetorical question. Will had read enough to know what a valet was. “Me. A valet. _This_ is my best outfit.” He plucked at his ivory colored linen suit, which had been Lyall’s but was taken in to fit his thinner measurements.

  
    “It looks well enough. It’s only a little out of season, Will.”

  
    “That’s like a crime to society folk,” said Will, his gaze boring into Rey’s. “ _You_ said that. You _said_ they’re judgmental and superficial.”

  
    Rey might have, but he couldn’t remember. He probably had while drunk. Rather than vomiting, he spewed novels while he was drinking.

  
    “Near-beggars can’t be choosers. And we are very nearly beggars.”

  
    “I’d rather the boatyards,” grumbled Will. “The docks.”

  
    “No, you wouldn’t,” said Rey sharply.

  
    “Says you.”

  
    “I hope your Uncle Jack doesn’t hear that in Heaven,” said Rey, but he’d long since stopped believing in Heaven. He didn’t know what Will believed in. “You’ll work around your schooling or take classes at night. There are options here that you’ve never had. I want you finishing,” he continued. Will’s education had been thorough thanks to Lyall’s tutelage and some stints in public schools, but it was patchy and untraditional. They were lucky there weren’t any active truant officers to speak of … or if there were, they were more interested in other truants.

  
     “Why?”

  
    “Because it will mean the difference between ending up like me or ending up like your uncle.”

  
    “You really think so?” Will asked. He tried to veil his words in disdain, but Rey knew he liked to learn and that he was uncommonly adept at it.

  
    Lyall once told him that Will’s memory was unparalleled; he’d used some word for it that Rey didn’t know—not that Rey quite had his finger on the pulse of what it meant for Will’s future anyway. Despite talent and dedication, Lyall only managed a degree because some benevolent soul left a behest earmarked for disadvantaged scholars. Rey couldn’t fathom how Will would follow his uncle, but he would do everything in his power to ensure it.

  
    Not that there was much at all that Rey could do. He thought savagely that if Cecile had somehow just convinced her parents to take Will back in with her, this would all be different.

  
    As a Graham, he was nothing.

  
    Snideness coloring his tone, Rey said, “Son, what has Lyall done that I haven’t?”

  
    Will pretended to think about it. Then he said slyly, “Not had a bastard. I’ve not got a cousin. At least, not from the wrong side of the sheets. I’m sure I might have some legitimate half-siblings running between the Opera and latest balls, though.”

  
    Rey glared at him. He couldn’t hit him, not now. “Lyall went to school. College.”

  
    “Oh,” said Will. He smirked. “That too.”  

  
    “Put away as much as you can. Our lodgings are on the property, so at least rent won’t eat away at wages.”

  
    In the offing was, _The more money you save up, the more money you’ll have when you really can’t stand me. Then you can go._

  
    Will seemed to sense this, given the now pensive expression on his—Rey flinched inwardly at the word—beautiful face. Will _was_ beautiful and Rey had started to fear he’d never be anything but.

  
     _“Would be_ on the property, you mean … neither of us has a job yet.”

  
    “Ever the realist.”

  
    “Someone has to be.”

  
    Truth was, they loathed each other. Will primarily for Rey’s utter reluctance to allow him any connection with his mother … Rey largely because Will was miles cleverer than him and he always reminded him of Cecile.

  
    But then, supposed Rey, that resemblance had been Will’s saving grace. He’d been so mawkishly attached to his and Cecile’s early days of friendship—and even memories of the irrevocable in that damn dark musty house—that “getting rid of” Will in any manner was unfathomable. Now, it depended on the day. Some days the ghost of Rey’s old faith stepped in and reminded him that charity, that family, that love, were important. Most other days saw him reaching for moonshine and fracturing his loyalty to everything and everyone else, even Lyall.

  
    He was in his prime, but already his liver pained him. As long as he could manage his tools and keep his dexterity he didn’t care. He drank to avert the shakes that would happen if he stopped.

  
    “This is it,” Rey said. He whistled. “Lyall said the scaffolding was still up when he called on them. Imagine being able to paint your house on a whim when some folks don’t even have houses.”

  
    “I was only just worried over the state of my suit,” said Will dryly. “I _can_ imagine being that sort of person, but it’s difficult.”

  
    “It’s in your blood somewhere.”

  
    “Yes, not that you ever let me think about it.”

  
    “With good reason—your mother took it all from you. Why think about what you can’t have?”

  
    Rey had stopped in front of an ornate townhouse that took up half the block on the quiet street. It was gleaming in the morning light, finished in shades that echoed the summer trees and buds. There was no front garden, but for a house structured like this—he knew from experience with the stately Devereaux home—a proper garden would be in a courtyard. Maybe two courtyards.

  
    Will’s dark eyes, generally blasé, actually scanned the house with interest. He had spent so little time in the city that he was easy to awe, but this house was worthy of it. Even Rey had to admit it was a beautiful structure, but his heart beat faster only when he considered that its beauty spoke loudly to him of potential earnings.

  
    “Get all your sass out now, Dad,” said Will in a drawl. “Whatever will Mr. Lecter think?”

  
    Rey reached over and cuffed him none too lightly on the back of his head.


End file.
